Mutual non-recognition between Israelis and Palestinians is a reciprocal mirror dynamic

Evidence

Rendered invisible and unseeable by Israelis, many Palestinians respond by refusing to see the state that refuses to see them. “The Zionist entity,” some still call it, seven decades after its formation. “Will you or won’t you acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist?” demand Israel’s leaders and defenders, insisting that a refusal to make this acknowledgment proves that Palestinians favor a second Holocaust. But many Palestinians and their supporters refuse to budge, knowing that conceding Israel’s right to exist would change nothing about its actions, and would uphold an idea of an exclusively Jewish homeland that they contest on principle. I understand this refusal—it is one of the few tools available to an occupied and vastly outgunned people. But it also seems worth acknowledging that for Jewish people who have been treated as inhuman for so much of our history, being called an “entity” is a wounding thing, and wounding in a way that may not be particularly constructive. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 983

Categorization

• XREF: Completes the doubling device: Israel refuses to see Palestinians, Palestinians refuse to see the state, each wounding the other the way doppelgangers annihilate each other — the personal doubling device extended to a national mirror. — connects to: Israeli-Palestinian double victimhood blocks viable socio-emotional reconciliation. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 1546